Archives for February, 2005

We just watched Tokyo Godfathers; very good. About three homeless people who find an abandoned baby, and try to track down its mother and learn why she abandoned it; good characters, good plot, good visuals, pleasantly bizarre. Hmm: that wasn’t much of a discussion of the movie, was it? The problem is, I’m really not […]

(Warning: really boring post follows. This is what’s been on my mind today, but Jordan will probably wish that I would go back to talking about Java.) There’s this big monster class that I’ve been dealing with at work almost ever since I got there. About a month or two into my job, I had […]

A few random thoughts about Java (to get out of the way so I can stop boring Jordan): I’m not thrilled with the whole checked/unchecked exception thing. Checked exceptions, to be honest, seem like kind of a pain to me: they make your code more verbose, but I don’t yet have reason to believe that […]

There was a good article in The Nation recently about religion and our founding fathers. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing – I’m aware that present-day religious fanatics would like to paint our country as inherently steeped in religion, and that many of the founding fathers could be better described […]

I’ve been a big fan of Bruno Latour for a long time now. He started off working in sociology of science, with some very insightful observations of scientists in action, of how science is actually produced and how scientific facts become accepted. Which is not quite the way it is presented by many scientists (or […]

I was sure that the school board was going to make a final vote on the school closure issue last Wednesday. The school board, however, has managed to surprise me at every other meeting on the issue; I don’t know why I expected anything different this time. They did vote to close a school. Which, […]

Liesl’s dad gave Miranda a copy of Mary Poppins for Christmas. And it’s great! I was starting to suspect that I might be a Julie Andrews fan, but now I’m sure of it (and should really go out and watch other movies of hers). I had no idea how good Dick van Dyke was, though, […]

Today’s video game is Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The first Metroid Prime game was my favorite Gamecube game, and was a real eye-opener for me. It was my introduction to the Metroid series, so I’d never seen its particular brand of exploration before. Games in the series take place in one big world; it’s divided […]

The school closure saga continues, and it gets stranger every week. Two weeks ago, I liked the school board but was mad at the superintendent. Last week, I was mad at everybody: the school board was just letting the superindentent and her staff talk, without (largely) seriously questioning any aspect of the report and its […]

One of the things I was excited to learn about in the new version of Java was how they added generics to the language. I didn’t expect it to be as powerful as C++ templates: that amount of generality, with its associated complications (e.g. having to separately compile separate instantations of the same template, or […]

I’ve played through somewhere between a third and a half of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas now. I’m not sure I’m going to finish it, largely because I don’t play it when Miranda is around, but I think I’ve seen enough of it now to say something. It (preceded, of course, by earlier games in […]